Google Talks about the Duplicate Content Penalty

31/10/08 8:11 AM

Google has confirmed that there never was a duplicate content penalty as many have been told. In fact in a recent statement they worked to end the myth. They do consider duplicate content a problem, but there is no penalty for such a use. They have made an official statement to that fact.

The actual truth is that duplicate content can be a problem for you and your site for several reasons, but Google doesn’t issue a penalty for it. As an example to show you how duplicate content can be an issue, look at two different URLs that may offer the same content. Google typically chooses only one of those URLs to be in the search engine results. In other words if you have two sites or someone steals your content word for word, only one URL will get the top ranking. You don’t get banned for a penalty for such content; it just doesn’t get shown. Google doesn’t like to have the same result twice as this is useless to the searcher.

Unfortunately the problem in this scenario is that the URL that should be used or that you want to be used may not actually get chosen by Google. Google uses programs to search and filter the duplicate content or URLs, which means they may not catch the more important pages to your site. We have a few suggestions as to how to get the correct URL into the search engine, without using duplicate content.

• You should link to the URL that you want indexed and be unchanging in how you create the links. A 301 redirect may be of use to you.
• Sitemaps can be of use in making sure you get the proper URL indexed. If you have different versions of your URLs make sure you use robots.txt files.

Duplicate content will not offer a ban or penalty; however it will also not help your situation. You want to have good rankings, which means you want to avoid things that will make the site perform worse. There are other in- depth measures to protect your page, but for now we will look at duplicate content more.

When stealing content from other sites on a huge scale in order to get the search engine rankings technically you can expect a penalty or ban. In other words you are going to sites to steal their content. You may not rewrite it, but post duplicate content. In this case you can expect a penalty or ban, especially if you do so a lot. It is considered spamming the search engine. In is instead called ‘content scraping’ rather than duplicate content, as you tend to change it a little to avoid getting caught.

Another concern regarding the double content issue is sharing content. If you tend to share what you write with other sites you could have multiple sites with your content. Google will again only show one of them and take away the rest. This can actually be a problem.

There are methods that Google and other search engines use to decide what page should be listed in the results:

• The first page indexed by Google
• The site authority of the hosted page
• If the copies are linked to the original source or not.

In other words if you allow sites to reprint your content then these pages should link back to the original to ensure that the correct URL is used. This way Google can tell with ease what the original site was for the content. You will also want to have embed- links to your site within your articles. This shows Google who the real creator was and it helps to show when content is liberated without permission. You can also report content theft.

The fact that filtering of the duplicate content occurs is the largest reason that article marketing skills first developed no longer work as well. If you offer a single article to 12 different article directories you will only get one link credit. The others will be seen as copies and not used. It is important to understand the proper article marketing and linkage you need. For any problems regarding duplicate content you just have to solve the issue with the proper action, not file any penalty reconsideration request.

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